i linked to part i the other day

i guess i should like to all parts, no? yes

(although we're only up to part iv)

The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 2)
By Errol Morris
TEN FEET OR LESS
James Curtis, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, in 1991 published a revisionist history of F.S.A. photography, “Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: F.S.A. Photography Reconsidered.” Curtis’s thesis was simple. “The bitter reality” of the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) photographs was not the result of clinical, photographic field work: “The realism was deliberate, calculated, and highly stylized.” According to Curtis, many of the most famous of the F.S.A. photographs — Walker Evans’ interior of the Gudger home in Hale County, Ala. (which appeared in Evans’s collaboration with James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”), Arthur Rothstein’s “Fleeing a dust storm” and the most famous photograph of all, Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” — were all arranged, staged and manipulated [5] [6].The purity of the F.S.A. style had to be called into question and reexamined...........




pic: Dan Mooney for Errol Morris; Library of Congress


The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 3)
By Errol Morris
THE GUDGER MANTEL

ERROL MORRIS: Rothstein was made the fall guy for this whole concept of posing and manipulation, but you suspected that Walker Evans was moving things, as well.

JAMES CURTIS: My favorite example is Walker Evans moving furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins in Hale County, Alabama. I was talking to Alan Trachtenberg [a professor of American history at Yale]. And Alan said, “Well, when your article on Evans came out, I was mad as hell.” And I said, “Well, what were you mad about?” And he said, “Well, what difference does it make if he moved furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins?” And I said, “Because Evans has been regarded as the high apostle of documentary honesty, and he said he never did things like that.” And afterwards, Trachtenberg replied, “Oh hell, we all know he was a liar.”

ERROL MORRIS: When did you first suspect that Evans was rearranging the furniture?...........
pic: library of congress

The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 4)
By Errol Morris

THE SORGHUM CANS

Many of the sorghum cans, by the way, were almost the only bright and new-looking things on the farm. Gudger may have bought them. If so, they are notable, for tenants seldom buy anything new.

— James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

As in most cases, the mantel mystery includes other sources of evidence that must be weighed against the evidence in a photograph — but should they be given equal weight at the outset of the investigation? How do we weigh the value of some evidence against another? Curtis surveys the evidence from Agee’s written descriptions. He writes in “Mind’s Eye”:

“Agee’s extremely detailed descriptions provide both the floor plans of the tenant homes and inventories of furniture and personal belongings. A close comparison reveals serious discrepancies between Agee’s word pictures and Evans’s photographs…”[23]

Agee may be “very precise” in his descriptions. But is he accurate? Why should we trust Agee and cast suspicion on Evans? Isn’t there something perverse about giving the written word primacy over the photographic image. Don’t we (habitually) do the exact opposite when considering evidence?.............

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